This is Zombocom.

Welcome.

You can do anything at Zombocom.

One of the great joys of putting together ROFLCon is unearthing the deepest, darkest, most hidden people behind the memes. Today, I’m glad to report one of our longest-standing quests is finally at an end: “Zblofu,” the founder, CEO, and oracle behind Zombocom, has been confirmed for the conference in May!

Zblofu has remained an enigma for years, and we’re thrilled to have him out to talk about the site, the internets, obtaining the impossible, and what really happens after Zombocom fully loads.

If you haven’t seen the site since it first was launched in 1999 (!!!), you might be interested to find that the site has been rendered in beautiful HTML5, implemented in Twitter, has been covered by xkcd, blacked out for SOPA/PIPA, and is also available as a mobile app.

So effing excited — we’ve got more announcements coming up tomorrow! Stay tuned.

Phew – sorry for the delay folks, we’ve been just completely overloaded here at ROFLCon HQ, and only now getting a chance to get back on the ol’ guest announcements bandwagon. Expect a return to your regularly scheduled programming from here on in.

In any case, a few weeks back we announced the good news that our friend Andy Baio would be attending and representing at ROFLCon III for an as-yet-unannounced panel. The behind-the-scenes wrangling has been officially concluded, and we’re thrilled to announce today that Andy will moderating a panel on the wonderful Internet phenomena that is supercuts.

Accompanying the session will be a trio of the creative minds behind some of the most epic supercuts ever committed to Internet. These will be:

* Rich FourFour Juzwiak – creator of “I’m Not Here To Make Friends” and “No Signal,” among others
* Duncan Robson – creator of “Let’s Enhance,” and “Tumbleweeds”
* Aaron Valdez – of Wreck and Salvage and recently of Star Wars Uncut

Links to their work, and other assorted awesomeness they have produced above. Thrilled to have all three of them! Welcome aboard, folks.

So, really, just when you thought that the ROFLCon guest list couldn’t get any larger — we’re decided to bust all previous expectations open by formally announcing a final series of new and alumni guests that will be turning up for the conference! Some of these you’ll know from their quiet appearance on our schedule, but others have been as yet unannounced to this point. Check it out! We’ve got:

* Neil Cicierega, of Lemon Demon, Potter Puppet Pals, and other greatness.

* Ian Spector, owner and operator of the Chuck Norris Facts.

* AJ Mazur, creator of the (by now classic) Lazy Town-Lil Jon remix.

* Larry Oji and David Lloyd, of the behemoth video game music community OCRemix.

* And, brand new this year, is Nick Prueher and Joe Pickett, general Masters of Pop Culture and the amazing minds behind the Found Footage Festival.

Okay, cool, I think that’s it. For now.

Aaaaand, we’re in the home stretch! ROFLTeam’s been pulling some late nights and putting out the usual fires, but the good news is that we’re looking to be on track and balling. Expect this blog to start getting way more active as we get into the final few days before the event — we’ve got some additional surprises (it’ll also be updating with coverage of the event and other fun tidbits on Friday/Saturday).

We’re glad to announce today the terrific news coming down the chute that the friendly folks over at Magners — those manufacturers of fine alcoholic Irish products — are coming on board as conference sponsors for ROFLCon II! Pretty happy to welcome them to the internet.

In practical terms, this translates to awesomeness. They’ll be representing with their fine Irish cider on Friday night at the Asgard (350 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA), where we’re setting up base and you’ll be able to hang out both during and after all the ridiculous things going on that evening. So, good stuff: definitely come and check it out!

Good afternoon, ladies and chaps — we’re sorry to interrupt your regular internet programming to bring you an exciting late breaking guest announcement today. Happy to officially drop the news that Biella Coleman, NYU Prof of Media Culture and Communication (read: awesomeness), will be a featured guest at ROFLCon II!

Specifically, she’ll be taking the helm and moderating our final mega-blowout keynote panel “Mainstreaming the Web,” with moot, Know Your Meme, Ben Huh, and Greg Rutter. Which is excellent.

Biella has done a great deal of work on the eccentric interfaces of internet culture and mainstream culture, and has had the fine distinction of presenting slides on lulz in various srs settings. For those among you of the definitively geekier persuasion, her name will probably be familiar from her turbo-charged work on open source/free software communities.

Anyways, this is superb news. Welcome aboard!

photo courtesy sfllaw, CC BY SA

With their nearly flawless corporate track record in designing robotic law enforcement devices and the 6000 SUX, we’re glad today to announce that the well-respected international conglomerate Omni Consumer Products is coming on board as a key partner for ROFLCon II!

You may remember Omni from ROFLCon 2008 as the company responsible for (fantastically) bringing Brawndo to life and keeping our conference two years ago hyped up on caffeine and electrolytes. One of their subsidiaries, Sex Panther Cologne, also was a sponsor during the festivities of ROFLThing-NYC. They’ve also since been the masterminds behind Tru Blood.

The shadowy and reclusive CEO behind Omni, Pete Hottelet, will also be attending and speaking at the conference. So, needless to say, we’re thrilled to have him on board.

Additionally, let it be known that ROFLCon II will be the official world premiere relaunch of Omni’s latest purchased subsidiary, Stay Puft Marshmallows. That’s all I’ll say for now.

Last, but absolutely definitely not least by a long stretch, ROFLCon is happy today to be announcing the last of our of special guest artist announcements by concluding this fine Thursday afternoon to say that the following fine ladies and gentlemen will be representing themselves and their creations at ROFLCon II:

* Joey Comeau and Emily Horne, creators of the beautifully dark and wonderfully brilliant A Softer World (and alums from ROFLCon I and our gallery show Titans of Small Town)

* AND Tak Toyoshima from long-standing favorite Secret Asian Man (who the sharper among you may have already picked up on from our announcement about Super Art Fight yesterday).

Thrilled to have ‘em both — catch them hanging around through the weekend, and otherwise kicking ass.

And, as of today, we’re officially t-minus two weeks before ROFLCon gets under way — mind-blowingly excited to see you all there!

Swinging back into the comix universe, terrifically happy today to be finally announcing that our friends Ananth Panagariya and Yuko Ota, creators of the gorgeously done, semi-biographical Johnny Wander, will be joining the guest list and attending the festivities at ROFLCon II!

You might also remember Ananth from Applegeeks, and may have seen his masterful design skills recently in action on ONI’s limited-edition geek-salivation-inducing Scott Pilgrim shirt. Both are works of high badassery and both Ananth and Yuko are folks of the highest order, so we’re absolutely lucky to have both of them on board.

Unbelievably enough, the guests keep on piling in as we run into the home stretch. We’ve got double announcements today, so check in later for a bonus bit of ROFL!

As we wind down these announcements, seriously glad this morning to make an exciting last minute guest confirmation that Max Goldberg, the creator of essential web culture classic You’re The Man Now, Dog, will be attending ROFLCon II! Max is a ROFLalumni from our NYC event back in 2009, and we’re thrilled to have him back for another round for our huge two-day extravaganza.

Max, in addition to contributing YTMND to the world, is famously also the owner of DustinDiamond.com — which, if you weren’t previously aware, led to one of the best legal suits of the American judicial system of all time. We can’t thank him enough.

So, yeah, we’re pretty much feeling like this right now.

Amazingly — was able to snag an image this morning that fits beautifully for two of our guests. So happy to give a double-trouble guest announcement this morning confirming that both the creators of Lamebook and folks behind My Mom Is A Fob will be attending and speaking at ROFLCon II!

If you haven’t seen it, absolutely worth checking out the treasure trove of aggregated awkwardness and hilarity on both blogs. Thrilled to have both of them participating: Jonathan and Matthew will be repping up on our “The Good, The Bad, and the Awkward” panel talking about embarrassing stuff on the internet, and Serena and Teresa will be participating in an evolving panel that we’ve got coming together about race on the wubs. We’re excited to have both of ‘em there for the party.

In any case, stay tuned! We’ve got a few more guest announcements and other good stuff coming down the pipe to round out this week.

Some of you who are fans and regular readers of such profoundly worthy online publications as The Onion and the Onion AV Club may have had the fortune of catching a rare glimpse of ROFLCon creepily advertising itself recently with the above bit of Shockwave joy. You’re welcome.

That little bit of genius was the product of the talented and awesome gentlemen and ladies over at Almighty. Which, might give you a good idea of why we’re happy to announce today that we’ve partnered up with them for ROFLCon II!

As sponsors, they’ve been deploying some great design talent to working with us on developing the registration pack and programs, as well as the stickers, buttons, and other bits of usual conference schwag that you’ll see later this month. We’ve been thrilled by how it’s been all coming together, and can’t wait for you all to see it, too. Stay tuned…

So — today, we were going to claim that we had successfully confirmed Goatse for ROFLCon II, and then link to it. But we figured that’d be in poor taste (and not in keeping with ROFLCon’s general high standards for “professional” behavior). Besides, anything we could come up with would probably pale in awesomeness to what some of our guests are up to today (and elsewhere).

To that end, we’re extremely happy today to confirm that the University of Illinois’ very own Lisa Nakamura will be attending and moderating at ROFLCon II! Lisa is a professor over at their Communication Research and Media Studies program, and head honcho of their Asian American studies program.

Her work is all over the questions about race (real and fictional) and internet culture, and it’s led to some seriously badass stuff (see, i.e. “Don’t Hate the Player, Hate the Game: The Racialization of Labor in World of Warcraft“). Worth reading, if you haven’t seen it yet (pdf alert).

We could go on and on, but for now, just wanted to say that we’re thrilled to have her! We’ll have more details and schedule info out tomorrow (yes, it’s true: we’ve finally hammered it all out).

Heyas, readers!

We’re keeping on keeping on here at ROFLCon HQ with all the guest announcements, and I’m happy to confirm all the rumors today that internet elder statesman and awesome dude Aaron Peckham, the creator of the internet knowledge repository that is Urban Dictionary, will be attending (and speaking at) ROFLCon II.

If you’re like me, Urban Dictionary figures prominently in the development of your knowledge of obscure pop culture exclamations, rage-filled commentary, and (probably, mostly, hopefully fictional) prohibitively nasty sex acts. It’d be difficult to estimate how many total hours of fascinated clicking have been lost on the site, internet-wide.

Also, if you lost track, the site has been up for a decade and now contains 4.8 million definitions. Outta control. In any case, Urban Dictionary’s seriously great, and we’re excited to have Aaron there. Welcome!

So, we’ve been sitting on this one for a little bit now (sorry about that), but everyone agrees on the ROFLTeam that it’s time to let this tiger right on out of the cage. So, we’re blogging it up.

Yes, glad to announce officially today that Mister Jeffrey Rowland — of the long-running webcomic institutions over at Wigu and Overcompensating (and some of his wonderful, wonderful crew over at TopatoCo, which stocks this recent geeky t-shirt gem) — will be loading up the wagons and making their way to Boston in April to attend ROFLCon II! We couldn’t be happier.

And what might all these webcomics folks be doing at the conference, you might ask? Good question! ROFLCon HQ is currently hard at work hammering out the schedule of events, tying up some loose ends, and confirming with all our guests before we ask them to do something ridiculous. But, we guarantee it’s going to be epic, and we’ll likely have it out next week. Sit tight.

First off, if you haven’t seen the video yet, you really should. No, really. Do this first.

Good? Great. We’re thrilled to announce today that ROFLCon will be screening the much acclaimed “Winnebago Man” – the documentary about the life and times of Jack Rebney (which Michael Moore has described as “one of the funniest documentaries ever made”). This will be an exclusive screening for ROFLCon II attendees – and a rare chance to see the film before it hits theaters nationwide this summer.

We’re very excited to share the film with you. And we’re even more excited to announce that the titular Angriest Man in the World himself will be calling in to ROFLCon II for a post-screening discussion with Ben Steinbauer (the director) and Alexy Vayner (Impossible Is Nothing). Moderation will be done by the talented and awesome David Weinberger. Which, all in all, indicates that this will be a pretty seriously kickass session of the conference.

Good news lumbering on its way through the ol’ internet today that one Rob Bricken, the editor-in-awesome of the much celebrated, unabashedly geeky blog Topless Robot, will be on his way to participate in ROFLCon II!

We’ve been busy assembling our panels for the event — but at the moment it looks like Rob will be sailing in to moderate an emerging panel on the relationship between mainstream pop culture and its weird emergence in the shady, moisty corners of the web. The blog’s coverage of the wonderful oddities of Fanfiction is profound, and we’re glad to have him there.

More event details, announcements, and guest announcements, all this week. 38 days until ROFLCon!

Sorry for the radio silence since announcing R. Stevens’ amazing conference shirt last week. We were out at SXSW over the weekend (and, happily, got a chance to meet a bunch of ROFLCon guests old and new) and only now getting the wheels a’rolling once again on the ROFLBlog as we head into the home stretch (45 days!). Going to be ridiculous.

In any case, it’s taken awhile, but officially announcing today that we’ve confirmed that Dan Lacey will be attending the conference, who you may remember as the creator of the weird and wonderful Naked Obama on a Unicorn paintings from a little while back.

Also, as you can see above, Dan’s been hard at work on a new surreal masterpiece for the conference that incorporates a TON of our guests. Seriously epic stuff. More announcements this week and into the weekend!

So, we alluded to this a little while back, but glad to do a big announcement today and make it all official and stuff after keeping it secret for so long. The official conference shirt is a go.

What you are seeing in the above image is correct: ROFLCon has teamed up with R. Stevens from Diesel Sweeties to create this magnum opus of pixel art genius. This shirt, which will then be printed as an official limited-run series with our friends over at The Mountain, will have the all-authentic tags and mystical powers of the original.

Needless to say, we’re thrilled we were able to get this all together, and hope you are as well.

UPDATE: We’ve decided that we’ll be printing the shirts and selling them proper at the conference for $15. We’ll be doing it all over PayPal, so bring your credit cards and/or e-mail addresses!

Really, really excellent news rolling out of this here ROFLCon joint that we’re glad to announce that the awesome folks over at the Onion AV Club are coming on board as media sponsors for ROFLCon II in April! Being silly geeky fans of the site, we’re all hearts a’flutter on this one.

Stay tuned on this one — in addition to teaming up with them, we’re in the process of working out trying to bring out some of the writers from the team (and random commenter micro-celebrities) for the conference as well, so, we’ll keep you posted as that situation develops.

Also, if you’re a huge pop culture nerd and want to lose the rest of your evening reading backposts, ROFLCon recommends such fine vintages as Nathan Rabin’s My Year of Flops and all the other beautiful things they have to offer (see: that time they ate a cheeseburger in a can).

A series of media and other fantastic sponsorships like whoah this week. Glad to kick that process off with some solid old friends: Boston’s venerable (and by that we mean since 1999) badasses and certainly the city’s number-one-awesomest weekly, The Weekly Dig, is officially teaming up and sponsoring us for ROFLCon II!

Veterans of the ROFLCon experience may remember The Dig from back in 2008 when they ROFLed up and reissued their April issue as the W33kly D1g. We’re glad to announce that they’re suiting up to do that again in a few months and promising to go even further with it than any magazine has done before. We’re not sure what that means, but we’re sure it’s likely to be amazing.

So to that we say to David Day and the team over at The Dig, we say, godspeed. We’ll keep you all posted here on the details as it comes together!